Boundary percentage flatters batters who cannot run

The share of runs a player scores in fours and sixes is a good description of their style and a poor description of their value.

A batter finishes with forty two off thirty and the graphic tells you that seventy per cent of those runs came in boundaries. This is presented approvingly, as evidence of a modern, aggressive player. It is also, read another way, the story of a man who scored thirteen runs in twenty two balls when he was not hitting the ball to the rope.

Both readings are available from the same number and only one of them ever gets said out loud.

Boundary percentage rose to prominence because it captures something real. In a format where the field is spread for most of the innings, twos are hard to come by and the reliable way to lift a strike rate is to clear the infield or the rope. Teams that hit more boundaries do generally score more. None of that is in dispute.

The trouble is when the metric gets used to judge an individual innings, because a high share means the denominator is small. Every ball not hit for four contributed almost nothing. A batter with a high boundary percentage and a modest strike rate has been quietly consuming deliveries in between, transferring pressure to whoever is at the other end, and the scorecard credits them with an exciting innings.

Strike rotation is the unglamorous alternative and it does two things at once. It scores at a floor of roughly six an over without risk, and it keeps changing which bowler is bowling to which batter, which breaks up the matchups a captain has spent the whole innings arranging. A pair running well can make a plan collapse without hitting a single boundary, and nothing in the broadcast graphics will show it.

I would judge a middle order player on their dot ball percentage before their boundary percentage, and in a chase I would look at it almost exclusively. Dots are where chases are lost. The required rate climbs invisibly while everyone waits for the big over that is supposedly coming.

There is a fair defence of the boundary hitter, which is that variance is a weapon when you are behind, and a player who can produce three sixes has a route to victory that a nudger does not.

True in the nineteenth over. Not true in the ninth, which is where most of these innings are actually being built.